THE artist Gordon Matta-Clark, who died in 1978 at age 35, loved to
cook, but he could never quite unbraid his culinary passions from those
of artmaking, with sometimes bizarre dinner party results. At one,
recalled his widow, Jane Crawford, he cooked a lovely whole sea bass,
but it emerged from the kitchen encased in a block of aspic nearly
three feet long. He unmolded it, then gave the table a good kick, so
that the aspic wobbled wildly and the bass seemed to fishtail upstream.

"All the guests looked at it with this sort of horror and
amazement," Ms. Crawford said recently. "In the end my mundane chicken
stew got eaten and everyone was too afraid to touch the fish."

A retrospective of Matta-Clark’' brief, highly influential career opening tomorrow at the Whitney Museum of American Art
will shine a new spotlight on the close but sometimes unsung affinities
between the worlds of art and food, and also on one celebrated example
of their coming together, the pioneering SoHo restaurant Food, which
Matta-Clark helped found in 1971 at the corner of Prince and Wooster
Streets.

The restaurant lasted not quite three years in its
original incarnation, as the artists who cooked in it and who ran it,
more as a utopian enterprise than a business, burned out or moved on.
But many of the vaguely countercultural ideas fostered there — fresh
and seasonal foods, a geographically catholic menu, a kitchen fully
open to the dining room, cooking as a kind of performance — have now
become so ingrained in restaurants in New York and other large cities
that it is hard to remember a time when such a place would have seemed
almost extraterrestrial.

The restaurant, for example, served
sushi and sashimi at a time when they were still not widely seen in New
York. (It was the idea of Hisachika Takahashi, assistant to the artist Robert Rauschenberg;
one early menu simply described it as raw mackerel with wasabi sauce.)
The same menu featured ceviche, borscht, rabbit stew with prunes,
stuffed tongue Creole and a fig, garlic and anchovy salad. Big communal
dishes of chopped parsley and fresh butter were kept on the counters.
Bakers came down from the Mad Brook Farm commune in Vermont to make the
bread. Two nights a week the cooks — modern dancers by trade — were
vegetarians and so was the menu, a kind of flexibility that was Food's
trademark. At least once the owners opened one of the restaurant’s
large windows onto the street and sold stalks of sugar cane to
passers-by.

Artists were also invited weekly to serve as guest chefs, and the
whole dinner was considered a performance art piece. One of the most
fabled, costing $4, was Matta-Clark's "bone dinner," which featured
oxtail soup, roasted marrow bones and frogs' legs, among other bony
entrees. After the plates were cleared, the bones were scrubbed and
strung together so that diners could wear their leftovers home.

"It
looked like an anthropological site," said the artist Keith Sonnier,
another guest chef and a member of the extended Food crowd, one that
also included members of Philip Glass's ensemble, dancers from Trisha
Brown's company and other artists like Robert Kushner and Donald Judd,
who lived in SoHo before it was called SoHo.

"You have to realize at that particular time in New York," Mr. Sonnier added, "people did not eat bone marrow." [read full article]

The Whitney Museum of American Art presents Seminars with Artists:New York CornersTaking its cue from the exhibition Gordon Matta-Clark: "You Are the Measure," this season's speakers explore art practices born from critical intersections with New York City.

I don't have as much detail on this file as I would like, but it sounds
like a winner, and one you probably won't see covered on the other sites you
read. It seems that SuicideGirls, the well-known "altporn" Web site, is
currently suing one of their former employees on noncompete grounds. The
defendant is a photographer who used to work for them, signed a contract
with a noncompete clause, and now they claim is running a Web site of his
own in competition with them against the non-compete agreement. His claim
is that A. he's not running the Web site in question, he only did contract
photography for it (which evidently wouldn't violate the agreement); B. the
Web site in question isn't in competition with SuicideGirls under the
definition in the agreement; and C. at least one of the clauses they're
trying to enforce wasn't even in the contract he signed. That's all a
pretty straightforward contract dispute and without having all the evidence,
you and I can't meaningfully judge it. What interests me more is some of
the stuff I've read in people's comments on the case, which suggests a
consensus that this case is part of a larger pattern of SuicideGirls using
legal threats, intimidation, and other shady means to create and preserve a
monopoly on the "altporn" genre. Their position (hotly debated by other
players) is that they are the first and original "altporn" Web site, they
invented it, they "own" the "altporn" genre, and anyone else doing similar
things is stealing from them. Sound familiar? Reports from the defendant's
side of the current lawsuit are in the lithium_panic
Livejournal community. A news article about it is on FleshPanic.
Both those linked pages contain softcore pornographic photos. I'm looking
for more details and will post them as I find them.

If the market for art is burgeoning, shouldn't that be a great thing for artists? Well, maybe and maybe not. A new exhibit in Queens, New York, "Not for Sale," gathers together dozens of paintings, sculpture and other pieces from the likes of Robert Rauschenberg, Jeff Koons, Maya Lin and Dennis Oppenheim. (See Randy Kennedy, "What They Keep for Love," in the New York Times, February 11.) The art works have little in common except for the simple fact that the artists do not intend to sell them. In today's market-obsessed culture, that is making a radical statement: not for sale.

The art at this exhibit takes backseat to the concept of the exhibit, which invites us to contemplate the meaning of "not for sale." What does it mean to withhold something for sale, and why? The curator, Alanna Heiss, says that she does not want to preach any message, but rather wants to invite contemplation of the intrinsic power of art for art's sake: "I just want to show people art that can be made and exist apart from the market for reasons that I hope still exist, even in this type of market."

Given the ways in which paintings can now sell for millions of dollars and eclipse the experience and meaning of the art itself, this exhibit certainly has admirable aims. If art becomes a wholly owned subsidiary of the market, it subverts its entire purpose for being. Yet of course, artists need to earn a livelihood, too.

As it happens, the artists of "Not for Sale" have many different reasons for keeping their works off the market. Some have highly philosophical reasons, others have personal and sentimental reasons. One artist, Richard Tuttle, is untroubled by the interdependency of the market and art, pointing out that this has been a historical reality throughout time. Yet on the other hand, who can be happy that the rich patrons of art are starting to dictate how artists make their art? Graduate students in art are actually tailoring their aspirations and work to make themselves more saleable. The end of art as a truth-teller?

I haven’t seen the exhibit, so it's hard to know if the works of art, as collected and shown, truly speak to the idea of inalienability. I suspect not. The exhibit is more of a conceptual packaging for an idea. Still, that idea deserves some serious attention. It’s about time that art and artists began to turn their attention to the ways in which commercial markets enhance or degrade the essential work of art.

The Feminist Art Project is a national initiative recognizing the aesthetic and intellectual impact of women on the visual arts and culture. The Feminist Art Project is administered by Rutgers University under the auspices of the Associate Vice President for Academic & Public Partnerships in the Arts & Humanities with the financial support of the Institute for Women & Art at Rutgers, the Maria and Henry Leon Memorial Fund, Judith K. Brodsky and Ferris Olin.

In 2002, the famously elusive artist David Hammonstold art critic Peter Schjeldahl, "The only place I really would like to show at in New York is the Metropolitan. It's full of spirit."

Hammons gets his wish with the current exhibition Closed Circuit: Video and New Media at the Metropolitan, the Met's first multi-artist exhibition of video art and new media. Among featured works is Hammons's five-minute video Phat Free (1995/1999), a mediation on race, public space, and the role of the artist.

On view through April 29 in the Lila Acheson Wallace Wing, Closed Circuit includes includes video and new media works made between 1994 and 2004 by eight international and American artists. Because of the variety of technologies involved, the Department of Photographs collaborated with several other departments in organizing and mounting the exhibition.

"while we always rely on departments such as Design and Editorial," said Doug Eklund, Assistant Curator, "with this exhibition we've also depended on the expertise of a wider array of departments, including Media Services, the Machine and Electric Shops, and the Electricians."

A theme throughout Closed Circuit is the blurring of lines between still and moving images, video and film, traditional art forms and cutting-edge technologies. The exhibition is drawn entirely from the collection of the Department of photographs, which began selectively collecting video and new media works in 2001. It takes its title from Lutz Bacher's 1997-2000 video of the same name, which uses thousands of individual frames to form a 40-minute composite portrait of the late art dealer Pat Hearn.

"We realized that the boundaries between media were breaking down," Doug said. "Certain kinds of video art could fit just as well into our collection [as still photographs]. We realized that if we're going to collect up to the present day, it didn't make sense to rule out this medium that is intimately connected to still photography."

The works in Closed Circuit range in length from 19 seconds--which studies show is the average amount of time that modern museum-goers, conditioned by television, spend in front of a single work--to 24 hours, and represent a range of media, including film, video, light-emitting diodes (LED) display, and digital photography. Because video art comes with detailed instructions from the artist about how it should be shown (for instance, whether through a projector or a monitor), putting together a show like Closed Circuit poses different challenges from an exhibition of photographs, sculptures, or paintings. [...]